[Buddha-l] the poignancy of Donald Lopez

[Curt Steinmetz]

Michael Jerryson claims to have been victimized by a sinister fraud 
perpetrated by Walpola Rahula, the Dalai Lama and D.T. Suzuki, who 
shamelessly sought to convince him, indeed, the whole world, of the lie 
that Buddhism is a "religion of peace." Worse, these fiends  were not 
alone in their "very successful ... propaganda", and "As Donald S. Lopez 
Jr. and others have poignantly shown, academics quickly followed suit, 
so that by the 1960s U.S popular culture no longer depicted Buddhist 
traditions as primitive, but as mystical."

Ah, the poignancy. It gets to ya, doesn't it?

In a recent article he wrote for religionispatches.org, Jerryson tells 
the cockle-warming story his own personal journey from clueless dupe to 
righteous debunker. His eyes were opened when he traveled to Thailand in 
2006 to an area where deadly attacks on Buddhists by Islamic Jihadists 
had been taking place. Jerryson had gone there hoping to be an 
eyewitness to the miraculous power of Buddhist "peacemaking". But 
Jerryson discovered that instead of inviting the terrorists to 
participate in small group discussions of the writings of Riane Eisler 
and Karen Armstrong, that Thai Buddhists were actually -- horrors -- 
defending themselves!!

Jerryson was not intimidated by the prospect of taking on the Dalai Lama 
and his propaganda machine. He had seen the truth, and it had set him 
free. Now the world must know!

On the off chance that there is a single person who actually takes 
Jerryson seriously (and, apparently, there are) I offer the opening 
sentence of the book that "has consumed much of the last six years of my 
life":

"It is a well known fact that the first of all commandments of the 
Buddhist creed is 'Thou shalt not kill'".

Curt

P.S. Jerryson's article at religiondispatches.org is here:
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/rdbook/2158/monks_with_guns%3A_discovering_buddhist_violence/